Many businesses rely on scheduled appointments to provide an agreed time and place to serve customers. In many cases, after serving a customer, a return appointment will be recommended for some time in the future. Often, an appointment is made for a return visit before the customer leaves the office. However, if the needed appointment is too far out, or if staff schedules are unreliable, or if a suitable appointment cannot be found quickly, then the office may instead choose to use a recall. A recall is a notice, sent to the customer prior to the desired appointment date, reminding the customer to call to schedule an appointment.
Many management systems that schedule customer appointments provide support for recall notices. Typically, these systems allow entry of a target date for the unscheduled appointment, which is associated with the customer, and some notes about the reason for the recall. On a regular basis, the management system is used to generate printed cards, letters or address labels, so that reminders to call for an appointment can be sent to the appropriate customers. Instead of printed reminders, automated calling systems are sometimes used to leave a recorded message requesting a return call to schedule an appointment.
There is another class of customers that are due back for a visit at a periodic interval based on accepted standards of care and office policies for a specific condition, but have not been scheduled for an appointment and are not set up in the management system to receive a reminder to do so. For example, glaucoma customers may require quarterly visits to manage intraocular pressures; diabetic customers may require an eye exam every six months; and healthy customers may require an annual eye exam. Sometimes, a customer may slip out of the office after one of these routine visits without a follow-up appointment or a recall being made. Other times an appointment is made, and then canceled or missed, and the customer then forgets to call for a new appointment. All of these events lead to a situation where a customer requires contact to schedule a needed visit.
Some management systems, particularly electronic medical records systems, store rules representing standards for periodic care, based on a customer's condition. However, these systems don't generally provide queries or reports covering the situations described above. Instead, these rules guide schedulers at the time that return appointments are made.
On the other hand, these systems often do provide a report or query which provides a list of customers who have not responded to recall notices, so that these customers can be contacted or reminded again. Unfortunately, a simple list of unresponsive customers is inadequate for schedulers involved in a shared, sustained effort to contact customers and schedule these appointments. Schedulers require a record of the times and dates of messages left so that additional messages are not left with the same customers until a sufficient time has elapsed as to warrant another contact. Further, schedulers require that as customers are contacted successfully and appointments are scheduled, these customers are deleted from the list so that these customers are not contacted again after an appointment is made.
These shortcomings make the process of contacting customers who have not responded to recall notices difficult enough that many offices choose not to make the effort, resulting in a substantial loss of business and profits. This invention overcomes these obstacles by automatically tracking which customers have been or are presently being contacted, so that multiple schedulers can work from the same list without making redundant calls to customers.
As of 2005, there were over 800 vendors selling practice management software, many of which support recalls and provide reports of customers who have not responded to recall notices. None of these systems provide the features described in this application to facilitate personally contacting customers to request appointments.